Sense: A gadget to change the way we sleep

entrepreneur James Proud, 23, presents a white sphere the size of a tennisball covered in a criss-cross pattern. “It is beautiful,” he says, when asked to describe it. “It doesn’t look like a piece of technology. 

We wanted to make something people actually want to put on their bedside table.”

 The device, called Sense, and the first made by Proud’s San Francisco startup company, Hello, is the latest in the world of sleep tracking devices claimed to help improve the quality of an activity we spend about third of our lives engaged in.

 It will be available in the UK early in the new year.

Until now, such devices have only tracked movement during sleep – giving an insight into when you toss and turn – but Sense takes things further by connecting that to the environment. Inside are sensors that record sudden noise and measure light, temperature and humidity in the room as well as the levels of particulates like dust and pollen that can affect sleep.

Just telling people how they slept doesn’t fix poor sleep, says Proud. “They need to understand why they slept that way.” Sense also records a sleeper’s movement, but not by requiring that they wear any device to bed, as most sleep trackers including Jawbone and Fitbit do. A small round plastic “sleep pill” clips onto the pillow. It contains an accelerometer and gyroscope and communicates with the system wirelessly.

The information that Sense gathers while you are asleep can be reviewed in an app. It includes a rating of sleep quality and a log of the disturbances experienced. If you slept poorly around 2am, Sense can tell you whether that was because of light, outside noise or snoring, for example.

Sense allows you to play back the noise disturbances – you can hear whether it was a car alarm or a barking dog that woke you. It automatically identifies snoring. Proud’s team trained the system to recognise the periodic sound by playing YouTube videos of people snoring – though Sense can’t yet distinguish whether it is you or your partner.

Over time the device also learns which conditions give you the best night’s rest. It might suggest that you lower the temperature by a few degrees, for example.

Waving a hand over the device makes it glow a certain colour, indicating how conducive the room is to sleep.